Category: Uncategorized

Like most men my age I don’t go to the doctor often enough.

Why should I? I’m fine.

The last time I paid a visit to my local learned disciple of Hippocrates was sometime last year when I had a panic attack. It had never happened before and with no experience I was concerned that I might be in the early throes of a heart thing. Not a heart attack. You know, just a “thing.”

It was very responsible of me. “Honey,” I told Carolann, “I think you should take me to the emergency room just to have this thing checked out.”

Aside from the fact that those hastily-spoken words cost me hundreds of dollars despite months of haggling with my insurance company, it was probably the most grownup thing I’ve done in decades.

It was only a panic attack. Twenty-nine people in my office had been fired that day. Go figure.

But, doctors need to understand something and if you know one personally, please do us all a favor and send him or her the following note:

Your holy Magnificence;

Mindful as I am of your superior breeding, social standing, intellect, training and anthropological evolution, I will make this as brief as possible. I am, of course, properly awed to be graced by your audience. As a mere mortal who has mindlessly placed my very life in your hands simply because you have a waiting room (EXCELLENT choice of name, by the way!) littered by the moaning, wheezing, coughing street denizens from Oliver!, and by the very impressive framed, yellow sheets of mumbo-jumbo accreditation posted on the wall nobody ever read, I beseech you:

Please remove the scale from the hall between your gatekeeper’s station and my holding cell, wherein I await you.

I am in your office because I’m sure that I have contracted cancer. Prostate, heart, throat, lung, stomach, hair or nails cancer — whichever it is, I’m sure I have one or more. (I work in the news business.) If not cancer, a malignant brain tumor. Or maybe I have something medical science hasn’t yet discovered. Terminal toe fungus, perhaps. The point is, I’m not visiting you and your insurance poltergeists just for my health.

You people scare the shit out of me and I know it’s by design.

But then you insist on conditioning me for Your Highness’s arrival. Protocol must be observed.

I am called forth from my leisurely repose in the company of the unwashed, looking at, but not actually reading, a six month old copy of Parenting magazine.

Your unholy Host hands me yet another clip board with still more pages to fill out, pages that require long answers handwritten into very short blank spaces. She bids me forth, into your lair. First, however, inevitably as death itself, I am ordered to stand on the scale.

I could be clutching an obviously broken arm, a compound fracture with bone protruding from my elbow; I might be spewing blood from an otherwise empty eye socket, and still you would need to know my weight.

WHY??

I’m sorry, Excellence. Guess I’m just a little self-consciousness.

I do note, however, that your big, professional, no doubt expensive scale inevitably registers me at fifteen pounds heavier than the one in my bathroom.

Nevertheless, I swallow that indignity and step into examination room 2 or 3. Sometimes 4, but that’s okay because you might already be in number 3! Or maybe you’re in number 5 and I have another hour to wait. Who knows? Not me. Nor, do I have a need to know! And certainly,  your staff isn’t troubled to take a wild guess.

And so, I sit… rising occasionally to examine the enlightening, if not fascinating, forty-year-old charts of the unisex human abdomen revealed in full — though, no doubt, inaccurate — color.

And then, suddenly, the ultimate indignity — your twenty-three year old female assistant, undersecretary nurse, or whatever the hell she is, enters and tells me to strip to my waist so that I might sublimate myself to await your esteemed arrival.

She leaves me to my privacy. She gives me a pleasant smile.

It’s not a personal smile. It’s nothing at all like the “checking you out!” smiles I got from twenty-three-year-old women when I was twenty-six. It’s a smile like my granddaughter might give me if she had just met me for the first time in her life and thought I smelled funny.

She leaves, closing the door before I gather the presence of mind to ask, “When you say strip to the waist, do you mean from the top down or from the bottom up?” At my age I can’t ask a twenty-three-year-old girl something like that, anyway. I’ll wait for you, Herr Doktor!

And I wait. And I wait some more.

I want to phone my wife for support but there is no cell service here.

I peek inside the drawers. Very long q-tips; ancient, barbaric looking instruments which have uses I can’t imagine.

I play with the pump on the wall-mounted blood pressure monitor which is never used because you have newer, better ones in the bottom drawer, purchased at CVS Pharmacy.

I don’t mind that the issues of Sports Illustrated in your examination rooms are eight months old. I never read them in the first place. I’ll start now, as I conscientiously forget about my terminal earlobe cancer.

Finally, you arrive!

The door fairly bursts from it’s insignificant hinges in your ethereal presence!

“Mr. Williams!” you boom, thrown into an unearthly relief of backlit brilliance. “How are we today?”

I begin to stammer that “we” are fine but I never quite get the words past my trembling, genuflecting lips.

“I see you still haven’t lost that weight,” you intone, with a wink and a flash of a teasing smile. But I know the underlying prognosis is terminal. I’m going to die very soon because I’m fat. You told me that the last time I was here and now you’re reminding me as gently and cruelly as possible. My fault. My bad. I haven’t lost weight and now I shall die.

By the time you’ve looked in my wax-impacted ears, my decay-laden, bad-breath mouth and my relentlessly bloodshot, darting eyes…

I have no idea why I came in here to begin with.

I just want to go home. Now.

As I get older and have determined as a pert-near certainty that the time of my life will never pause or reverse itself, I increasingly find I am comparing life in America when I was a child with the great fears and uncertainties of now and tomorrow.

I get a lot of emails from my contemporaries (an odd word to apply to people well past midlife) which tickle my brain to call out my happy, youthful self and to remember:

…when Mom stayed home and cooked and cleaned while I went to school and Dad brought home the bacon.

…when every breakfast was eaten at the table with the whole family there to discuss their daily plans and hopes. We’d reconvene for dinner to discuss our daily achievements.

…when we had no virtual technological distractions except for three channels of black and white small screen miracles.

–when Sundays were for church and family; when nobody had what they wanted but everybody had all they needed.

You get those emails, too. They’re fun. But maybe the most engaging ones are those which remind us how much more safe and sane our old world seemed.

We didn’t have “drive-by” random murders in the fifties and sixties. Never.

None of my friends was ever snatched off the street by a gang-banger or boogie man.

None of the kids I knew was ever physically assaulted or molested. Not that I ever heard of, anyway.

Inevitably these journeys through the past offer us wistful glances of a world that was much easier to navigate and in which we could lay our heads at night, secure in the comfort and peace of our own bedrooms, on our Spin and Marty sheets and pillow cases, and with a quiet “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” we could revel in the day we just lived and exalt in the gift of yet another day tomorrow. And for all the tomorrows we could imagine and more.

So, here’s how I see it.

It doesn’t matter when you were born. My four and six-year-old grandsons will have the same wondrous journeys and make the same magical memories as I did, and as did my father and grandfather before me. And fifty years from now they’ll tell their kids and grandkids how primitive life was in the early twenty-first century.

And they’ll love the memories.

No time is better than another. The magic lies in being young enough to have nothing with which to compare it.

This morning in one of my KABC radio newscasts I read a story about British scientists who are developing digital technologies to assist the elderly and disabled in matters of everyday living.

The story explained how one invaluable tool we’ll all soon have to help us find our way through the labyrinth of our old-age dodderage is a Global Positioning System to find what we need in the grocery store.

Need to track down the canned peas? Check your GPS.

And they’re serious.

At this point in my life, as a young elderly man, I still bear enough conceit to believe that if I eventually get so befuddled as to be unable to find the canned vegetables without consulting my Garmin Geezer I should probably stay home.

How the hell am I supposed to find the store in the first place if I can’t find the peas once I get there?

And, we all know how adept the elderly are at figuring out how to use new gadgets and how much they enjoy the challenge!

My dear mother, bless her heart, is one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. Her sharp wit, her native intellect and her instinctive, loving charm have been an inspirational influence in me for fifty-eight years. They still are.

But the computer we bought her for Christmas several years ago is just a giant paperweight in her dining room. It’s furniture, actually. She placed doilies on the monitor and speakers. My bronzed baby shoes adorn the keyboard. She sprays lemon-scented Endust on the cpu tower, carefully avoiding the power button so as not to accidentally activate the thing.

And I’m starting to get it…

I’ve been paying bills and shopping online for nearly two decades. I embraced the interactive charms of the Internet back in the day when Prodigy allowed you to post notes on bulletin boards and anxiously await responses from people thousands of miles away.

I play Lord of the Rings Online and before that I spent years with my wife and our international friends playing Everquest and Everquest II. We talk into microphones in real-time with people around the world while we’re playing. (Though, we don’t know the next door neighbors.)

Email is the twentieth century invention of the wheel and fire.

I IM (Instant Message); I have a Facebook page which commands about 40% of my semi-wasted life (much more if you subtract the time I sleep) and now, dadgummit…I have been sucked into Twitter.

I admit this with a mix of confusion and shame:

I am tweeting.

I don’t get it, but I’m curious and trying to keep an open mind.

Twitter, for those of you who have real lives with face-to-face personal relationships, is a means of communicating with people in the most shallow way yet devised, with very short bursts of written expression.  You have a limit of 140 typed characters for each message with which you decide to annoy your friends and loved ones. These are called “Tweets.” These can be read by your “followers” on computers and Internet-enabled cell phones like Blackberry and iPhone.

For example, imagine you’re at work between conferences with your law partners and a potential major corporate client. During a quick break you check your Twitter:

“I’m trying to decide whether to take a nap or go buy milk.”

“I need a nap. Or a beer. Or both.”

“Wish you were here. Not really, LOL! 🙂 I prefer being alone in my cave but I want you to think highly of me.”

And, the honest tweet you’ll never receive:

“The best thing about Twitter is that I can tell you what I’m thinking without having to listen to your response. C-ya!”

Minute to minute intrusions throughout the day, meaningless mind farts to and from people you love and used to admire.

I swear…

Among the many gifts God gave us none is greater than the ability to keep our thoughts to ourselves and the inherent good judgement to do so.

On Mondays I figure out how long I’ve been unemployed. Today begins my twelfth week as a victim of the depressed economy. (That was wry humor. I’m not a victim of anything. I just have a long subscription to life.)

I’m neither ashamed nor much concerned by my layoff. I know Americans take pride in working hard and I did for nearly forty years. Now I’m taking pride in catching a break and spending my free days wisely. I’m resting, seeing more of my family and Carolann and I have taken up a new hobby: horse racing.

I suppose most people with extra time on their hands discover gardening or join reading groups. Carolann and I have discovered how to box exactas and read racing forms. Yesterday we spent our third full day in three weeks at Santa Anita Park and we love every minute of it. The storied home of Seabiscuit absolutely oozes a dramatic history involving magnificent animals and courageous, short men. The weather is perfect, the landscaping is immaculate and every thirty minutes is spent in brow-furrowed study, the anticipatory trip to a parimutuel window and the race itself, a climax of mass excitement!

I’m convinced that Santa Anita is populated by Central Casting. Everybody you’ve ever seen in a racing movie is there: old men in frumpy hats pulling on cigarettes and studying charts, young men filled with too much beer and testosterone, and happily, though somewhat oddly — families with young children looking as if they took a wrong turn enroute to Disneyland.

The sweet aroma of fresh grass, rich turf and plush floral displays, the Call to the Post, the clunk and ringing of the starting gate and the roar of the crowd is all quite invigorating.

If learning to gamble seems like a ridiculous pastime for somebody unemployed and pinching pennies, consider this: Six hours of outdoor fun and wagering excitement yesterday cost us about seventeen bucks. Next week we might win*. Try to beat that at a movie theater.

* In the spirit of full disclosure I must report Carolann actually did win yesterday. My losses dragged down our average.

I always thought that seemed a smug presumption.

You know the rest of it: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” It presumes that the poor bastard you’re referring to did not have (and by implication must not have deserved) the grace of God and you are therefore thankful to God that it was somebody else and not you who was dropped into life’s dunk tank.

A couple of weeks ago I got a note from a special friend telling me that he had just attended his son’s 32nd birthday party. It was a joyous affair with many friends and members from both sides of the young man’s family in attendance. The birthday boy’s own daughter was there. You can just imagine.

Then, my friend told me that a couple of days later his son, his pride and joy, had been killed in a car crash while going to the mountains for a day of snowboarding with a friend.

I reject the smug presumption and yet, I can’t stop thinking it.

My own son’s 32nd birthday was two days ago, barely a week after my friend lost his. We went to dinner, gave him gifts, sang to him, lit candles, cut the cake and when the evening was over I hugged him tighter than usual and told him this story.

“You’re not supposed to bury your kids,” I told my son as he held his own son in his arms. “When you were born I made a deal with God. I promised to raise you and give you all the things you would need to make a wonderful, happy life for yourself. In exchange I simply asked that he not let me bury you.”

I hugged him again. I hugged my grandson and my friend, though he wasn’t there.

And I gave silent thanks to God in the form of a seemingly smug presumption. But now I realize it isn’t like that.

It’s just the natural confluence of relief and faith.

The young man was clean, well-groomed and polite.

“Going to watch the game Sunday?”

“Isn’t everybody?” I replied glibly without a split-second’s hesitation. I don’t know why. I’ve never done anything like that before. I know from more than fifty years of living that lies corrode one’s soul. Besides, when you lie about sports or politics  you inevitably get caught in your own web.

“Who’s going to win?” he smiled.

“Steelers,” I assured him. Where was this coming from? What malignant spirit had taken possession of me? Why was I fibbing about something of absolutely no consequence? And yet, I wasn’t finished.

“Is it going to be blowout?” the young man pressed while guiding the courtesy shuttle toward my home, which suddenly seemed a continent away. We couldn’t get there soon enough to shut me up.

“I don’t know,” I said with wrinkled brow, the very picture of a man examining his superior expertise, “I don’t think so but Pittsburgh’s defense is just too good for the Cardinals.”

Ten minutes earlier I had no idea who was playing in the Superbowl tomorrow. When I’m sitting in the waiting room of the Toyota dealer’s service department I’ll read anything I can find. Ten minutes earlier it happened to be the sports page, which I never read anywhere else.

And now I was lying to a clean young man, well-groomed and polite.

I could brush this off as a victim of cultural insistence. I am an American man. We worship at the alter of the NFL. While I have boldly, even cheerfully admitted to preferring chick flicks to action movies and my inherent ineptitude when the subject turns to Motor Trend magazine this — this is beyond the pale.

I don’t care about football. Not even the Superbowl.

Those were the most painful two sentences I have ever written. The shame is coursing through my stomach. I can’t stop thinking of my father and my sons. They expect more from me. I am grateful my camping buddies aren’t here to witness this. Confession may be good for the soul but it can torture the heart.

I don’t care one whit about football.

Please, let me be alone.

Sometimes I wonder if I have changed much over the past, say, fifty years. Beyond the obvious, I mean. Sure, I’ve learned a lot and had as many personally defining experiences as I’ve had heartbeats. I just wonder if I am essentially the same person I was as a child, a teenager; a 20-30-40 something.

Do we really change over time or do our personalities simply undergo the same sort of superficial aging that our bodies do?

I’m always looking at total strangers and trying to imagine them as children. Transients for example, the people we used to call “bums.” When you see a dirty man in tattered clothing drinking from a paper bag or pushing a shopping cart do you ever wonder what series of misfortunes took him where he seems to be? I say seems to be because none of us can fairly judge the lives of others but still, it seems clear that this downtrodden man is not the current visage of a once happy, fresh-faced child. Surely somebody once loved him. Maybe somebody still does.

What happened?

The other day I was in line at the supermarket and the woman in front of me was taking forever getting through the process. The checker had finished totaling the woman’s modest basket of products but now the customer was digging slowly through the contents of her purse looking for coupons. She found plenty but apparently not the ones she needed. As we all waited patiently the checker sent the bag-boy off to find the manager who then began to search through his office for the correct coupons. Meanwhile, the lady in front of me seemed oblivious to the growing line of increasingly irritated people behind her.

I was fine. I was in no hurry and found it kind of funny. I had a small wager going within myself that once the coupon crisis was solved, then and only then, the woman would begin looking for her checkbook and spend another five minutes writing the check, entering it into her records and deducting it from her balance. She might even pull out a handheld computer.

The oblivious are truly oblivious.

Meanwhile, the man behind me was commenting on the procedure.

“Can we get this thing going?”

“Jesus Christ, is everybody on strike here?”

“What the hell’s taking so long?”

He crabbed a new sentence approximately every thirty seconds. None of us responded but the checker looked at me and slyly rolled her eyes. I smiled. The oblivious woman saw and heard nothing.

At some point in all of this I began to wonder why this man in his sixties or seventies was so grouchy. Sure, he had only two items and had been waiting, as I had, for an inordinately long time to get through the checkout but it was a pleasant day. I couldn’t imagine that he needed to get somewhere with a bag of potatoes within the next five or ten minutes. Probably he was just going home to park himself in front of the TV and crab at his wife while she fixed his dinner.

How’d he get like that? And if I, a perfect stranger, thought he was being an ass what must his own family and friends, assuming he has any, think of him? What lovely part of his happy, gentle nature am I not seeing? Did he even have another side to him?

Not that it’s any of my business, of course. But, keeping my thoughts to myself I worked the process through to a logical conclusion.

What nice things would people find to say about this man at his funeral? They’d probably say things like, “He was strong in his convictions,” and, “He never backed down.”

I could be completely wrong, of course. I may well have just seen an unflattering moment in the life of the most wonderful husband, father and grandfather who ever walked the earth. But it did remind me that the way we treat others has eternal consequences. We make ripples.

I want to be remembered smiling, tolerant, patient, wise and goofy. I should start working on that memory right now.

Oh, and I was right about the checkbook.

Today is Monday in most places but not where I live.

About four days into my recent unemployment something happened. I lost track of what day it was and suddenly my world defaulted to Saturday, our perennial American favorite.

All through my working adult life I have adored Saturdays and felt glum on Sundays. I suppose it’s because I knew Monday was coming and I hadn’t finished my homework and would have to take a bath and go to bed early. That sort of thing stays with you as long as you’re on the rat track. Even when I worked weekends and had, let’s say Wednesday and Thursday off, I would get that special little thrill of anticipation in each Friday and feel a growing, depression on Sundays. It’s a psychological habit, I guess and I may never kick it.

Now I begin each morning before daybreak at my computer with a thermos of coffee and our little dogs snoring happily at my feet. As daylight grows I begin to think of all the ways I can be productive and happy today. I think of the things I no longer have to do.

In SaturdayVille nobody seems to be in a general hurry without good reason. Stress is a word applied to the poor working stiffs. Clocks are mostly meaningless.

I know I’ll go back to work eventually and I’ll be happy about it. For now, though, a long break from the demands and routines of Sunday through Friday is delightful. Carolann and I may take a long trip in our motor home. Maybe I’ll finish my book. Maybe I’ll just take a nap and then watch some TV.

Life in SaturdayVille is idyllic. I think you’d like it.

I didn’t go to work today.

It’s a dark, unusually cold and rainy morning in Southern California, a Monday. The first day of the work week is usually a bit of a struggle because two days of being out of sync with my workday routines tends to throw me just a bit. It’s not that I ever have a case of Monday blahs, it’s just a psychological phenomenon I’ve had to deal with for as long as I can remember. Monday mornings are like turning the clocks ahead to Standard Time every seven days. It’s not big deal but merely a nagging one day oddity which I shouldn’t have to worry about for awhile.

I lost my job this past Friday.

I have always had the odd (you can say “weird”) habit of viewing my emotional reactions to things from a perspective of detachment.

I watch and try to analyze my emotions even as I am experiencing them. Many years ago I started kibbitzing my marriage counselor about how she might help me survive and prosper through my divorce. Now I am trying to understand why I am having my standard workday Monday funk even though I’m not working.

It’s cold and rainy. Did I mention I lost my job?

I’m going to study this for a bit because introspection is a tricky business. False conclusions beg for sudden embrace.

I love cold, rainy mornings. Truth be told, I liked the people very much but that job was very frustrating. So, why the funk?

Did I mention it’s Monday? That’s all it is. Just Monday.

You can overthink this crap to death.